Diary Of An Artist In A New World

Dealing With Anxiety At The Dentist

Root canal. The words strike irrational fear. Like snakes, we instinctively recoil from certain things. Dental work is one of them. I was at the dentist today, and root canal therapy was the agenda. I get very anxious. I was a victim of a country schools dental program in which there were dental nurses only - no dentists - and they drilled without anaesthetic. It was the country in the 1960's. Boys displaying courage was more important than spending money on anaesthetics. The only encouragement consisted of being told that only girls cry and be still. Now I would never go to any dentist voluntarily unless there is great pain.

My Friend Clarence

Dr Clarence Rainwater was my friend. He was my best friend. He died recently not long after his 88th birthday. Over a few months whenever I phoned him I could see his decline. He would repeat himself and at times was confused and toward the end found difficulty in relating a voice on the phone with someone he knew well. I spoke with him 4 times while he was in hospital. It seemed to me he was getting better, but then the next time I tried to ring I discovered that he had died.

I first met Clarence in the late 1980's in Cairns. He was interested in drawing, I was running a sketch club. I soon discovered he was a wonderful artist with the camera. I loved his individuality, his love of books, his love of fascinating things like crystals and old microscopes and cameras. I built his darkroom for him at Boden Street at the end of his garage. He gave me a Graphlex camera in return for it. I also bought a Speed Graphic from him. We generally spent Tuesday nights together talking science and philosophy and art. In the country it is rare to find someone really interesting to interact with.

Christo And Jeanne-Claude In Person

Yesterday I had the great privilege of listening to Christo and Jeanne-Claude talk about their work, and afterwards actually meet them. As a couple they are as fascinating as their art works. Two beautiful people with an extraordinary vision. They are a delight to listen to. Like great performers they know their lines well, and have developed impeccable timing. They play the audience like puppetmasters, yet for all that they are open, and surprisingly candid about the intimate details of how their work comes to fruition.

Norman Mailer: A Brilliant Mind

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007) is possibly one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Possibly not. However, according to some of his critics he was little short of the devil incarnate. That such a range of statements is found in the same paragraph is a mark of the contradictory and provocative nature of a man who new no fear when it came to the role of the writer as artist.

Some people sample life, others observe it. In Mailer's case his philosophy was "be physical" - get in there and live life with passion, and an appreciation for those moments that separate leaders from followers; those times when fear, duty, experience, and courage come to the fore, as when a pugilist steps into the ring against someone who may well cause great pain and loss, yet does it anyway because winning is not possible until that bridge is crossed.

Of course as every war shows, the heat of the moment sometimes brings out the worst in people and Mailer was very publicly exposed when he was alleged to have stabbed Adele, one of his 6 wives.

Leonor Fini - An Extraordinary Artist

Léonor Fini  1907 - 1986

Leonor Fini never knew what it was like to be "normal". Others would have wilted from the stresses of a traumatic childhood. Leonor Fini thrived, and became one of the 20th century's greatest artists and free thinkers. She lived for forty years in a menage a trois at a time when that was unthinkable. She was independent in thought and deed, and a painter of pictures of haunting beauty, a truly remarkable woman.

Fini was born in Argentina, but her mother fled to her native Trieste in Italy when Leonor was only a year old. For the next 6 years she lived in constant fear of her husband kidnapping their daughter and pretended that Leonor was really a boy, and dressed her as a boy to disguise her identity. Leonor was considered difficult (perhaps understandably so), and was expelled from every school she ever attended.

Paradoxically Leonor had a voracious appetite for learning along with a burning desire to be an artist. She taught herself by visiting the morgue and drawing the bodies as they arrived. She was fiercely independent and refused to accept restrictions of conventional life or artistic practice. She is thus regarded as self taught.

Once A Viking, Always A Viking, Even A Facebook Viking

The Internet enriches my life in many unexpected ways. Recently I made a Facebook profile and have discovered some very surprising and wonderful things. Firstly it surprised me how many people I already knew were on Facebook. Secondly I was surprised how easy it is to keep in contact with existing friends by using Facebook. Thirdly are the new friends I am making through Facebook.

There is a feature that enables easy discovery of people in far away places called World Friend-finder. Naturally I used it to find people in Norway, especially Bergen where my family comes from. So I now have 4 friends in Norway and they have proved to be interesting people, the sort of people who it is a pleasure to converse with. There is more to it though. I get the feeling that I "fit" with these people. I like their attitudes to life. It is as if the Viking genes are saying that I share some very fundamental things, that my genetic heritage recognizes the wider Viking family that I come from. It is a good feeling.

Thank you Facebook, for giving me this.

Fumbly And Other Creatures

Philip Aspden

I have known Philip for many years. I was just 20 and had just arrived in Kings Cross. I entered an exhibition, and he was in it (both looking at the art to decide who to vote for for "People's Choice", both too innocent to vote for ourselves. We met, we voted for each other, and then he suggested we go for a drink at a pub he knew.

A couple of weeks later he invited me to take a room in Jake's Monastery. The Monastery was neither religious, nor reputable. It was in fact a rabbits warren of tiny rooms inhabited by artists, writers, musicians, and other bohemians. I thought it was heaven.

Phil was, and is, an artist. A very good one. But unfortunately too left field for a fashion driven art world. He paints delightful creatures like the Fumbly and writes poetry and songs about them.

This Fumbly painting had been on my wall for the last four years. I love it, and so when Phil said he needed it back to sell, I bought it from him. Of course as happens between artists, especially ones who are long term friends, it became a practical swap of some stretchers for the artwork, otherwise artists would rarely be able to afford to buy any art, so I am grateful that I could do this and Fumbly will grace my wall for many years to come.

Take a look at some more of Phil's artwork at his new web site.

Review Of In The Shadow Of The Moon: Pure Brilliance

There are certain events that etch so deeply in the memory that years later we can remember every detail of our surroundings and thoughts as we heard the news. 9/11 is like that for me, as was the deaths of John Lennon and Elvis Presley. High on my list of memorable events, however is one that is not about death. It is the positive and inspirational moment of those first steps on the moon.

Other people saw it on television. Our school, being in a provincial town, had no TV and the radio broadcast was piped through the school PA system. No doubt by a secretary holding the mike up to a transistor radio. It sounded like it - screechy and indistinct, but in the middle of that chaos of squawky noise one of the greatest moments in the history of humankind was discernible. A man was stepping onto another world for the first time.

In The Shadow Of The Moon is a newly released movie that brings that experience to life again by piecing together previously unseen footage from the NASA archives and digitally enhancing the original. Previously seen film from the control room, for example, was silent. The makers of In The Shadow Of The Moon spliced together audio tapes from the control room and using the same techniques musicians use to lip sync music, they put the voice back into the moving lips as the drama unfolds.

Likewise the footage shot by the astronauts in orbit and on the moon is brought to life by the addition of an audio track. In this case it is the astronauts themselves describing what was going on from their perspective as human beings looking back to events they can never forget.

Michael Collins the astronaut who stayed in the lunar orbiter while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon, and for a while became the most isolated human being in history, has revealing insights and  remarkable observations that turn something that could easily be the dry ramblings of a pilot into the exciting human story that this great adventure was. After all the millions of dollars spent, and the incredible machinery put to work (Apollo Five is still the most powerful rocket ever made), it is in the end a story of the courage and adventurous spirit of some visionary people that made the lunar landing possible.

It seems incredible some of the risks that were taken. It should not be forgotten that the effort to get to the moon was at the cost of precious human lives. The movie reveals in the astronauts own words their own fears surrounding certain exposed wiring in the pure oxygen atmosphere of the space capsule. These fears were proved real when the 3 astronauts of Apollo One were burned to death on the launchpad. It appears they were fearful of the wiring, but more fearful of complaining due to the risk of losing their place as astronauts on the project.

The production notes for the movie demonstrate the extraordinary steps the producers took to recreate these awesome events and the sensitivity they exercised as the project developed:

"Producer Duncan Copp and co-producer Chris Riley spent many weeks in the NASA film library examining cans of film - some of which had not been opened for over 30 years. This search uncovered many gems, including astonishing space shots which have been re-mastered from the original film rolls to reveal the Apollo program with a visual clarity and impact it has never had before. The mute 16mm rolls shot in Mission Control have been laboriously lip-synced with the 16-track audio recordings of the mission controllers' voice loop to re-unite the pictures and sound of many historic moments for the first time, lending a striking immediacy to many dramatic scenes.

"The film has some stunning shots in space of the spacecraft separating and docking. This was engineering footage shot so that the engineers could investigate the cause of any problems – in effect a sort of visual "black box recorder". There were cameras built into the various stages of the Saturn V rocket which would automatically shoot key moments, usually at high frame rates on 16mm film. The cameras would then eject (you can see this happening on one particularly spectacular shot of the final stage firing) and re-enter the atmosphere, where they would be caught in mid-air by high-flying aircraft equipped with nets! It's an amazing story we plan to tell in one of the DVD featurettes. One of things we wanted to do was really allow the audience to luxuriate in this amazing footage – and so some shots we play in their entirety."

"Perhaps the most astonishing thing to me about this project is that this film had not already been made," said director David Sington. He then went on to describe the surviving astronauts who were able to participate in the film. "The best thing about it has been meeting and talking to ten of the most remarkable individuals I have ever met."

This movie has enough blasting rockets to please hardened technophiles, enough tales of courage to please the adventurous, and enough heart and soul to please the rest of us.

Ron Howard Presents In The Shadow Of The Moon
Blasting off September 2007
Website / Preview of In The Shadow Of The Moon

The Poet Of Silence

Bohemia lost its genius of silence today. Marcel Marceau, who performed for 50 years as Bip, the clown, and never said a single word, while still able to communicate volumes. He died today at age 84. No one else has ever spoken directly to so many without saying anything before. Now he joins the eternal silence. He was rich in words he never spoke. The world is poorer for his passing.

Arthur C. Clarke, Message To Nasa

Transcript of a message to Nasa when the Cassini spacecraft flew close by Iapetus. Iapetus was the original setting for the monolith in Clarke's book.

Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, joining you from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.   

I'm delighted to be part of this event to mark Cassini's flyby of Iapetus.   

I send my greetings to all my friends - known and unknown - who are gathered for this important occasion.   

I only wish I could be with you, but I'm now completely wheelchaired by Polio and have no plans to leave Sri Lanka again.   

Thanks to the World Wide Web, I have been following the progress of Cassini-Huygens mission from the time it was launched several years ago. As you know, I have more than a passing interest in Saturn.

And I was really spooked in early 2005, when the Huygens probe returned sound recordings from the surface of Titan. This is exactly what I had described in my 1975 novel Imperial Earth, where my character is listening to the winds blowing over the desert plains.

Perhaps that was a foretaste of things to come! On September 10, if everything goes according to plan, Cassini would give us our closest look at Iapetus - one of Saturn's most interesting moons.

Half of Iapetus appears as dark as asphalt, and the other half is as bright as snow. When Giovanni Cassini discovered Iapetus in 1671, he could only see the bright side. We had a better glimpse when Voyager 2 flew past in August 1981 - but that was from almost a million kilometers away.

In contrast, Cassini is going to come within a little over one thousand kilometers of Iapetus.   

This is a particularly exciting moment for fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey - because that's where the lone astronaut Dave Bowman discovers the Saturn monolith, which turns out to be a gateway to the stars.

Chapter 35 in the novel is titled 'The Eye of Iapetus', and it contains this passage:   

"Iapetus was approaching so slowly that it scarcely seemed to move, and it was impossible to tell the exact moment when it made the subtle change from an astronomical body to a landscape, only fifty miles below. The faithful verniers gave their last spurts of thrust, then closed down forever. The ship was in its final orbit, completing a revolution every three hours at a mere eight hundred miles an hour - all the speed that was necessary in this feeble gravitation field."

More than 40 years later, I cannot remember why I placed the Saturn monolith on Iapetus. At that time, in the early days of the Space Age, earth-based telescopes couldn't show any details of this celestial body. But I have always had a strange fascination for Saturn and its family of Moons. By the way, that 'family' has been growing at a very impressive rate. When Cassini was launched, we knew of only 18 moons. I understand it is now 60 - and counting.I can't resist the temptation to say:

My God, it's full of moons!   

But in the movie, Stanley Kubrick decided to place all the actions at Jupiter, not Saturn. Why this change? Well, for one thing it made a more straightforward storyline. And more important, the special effects department couldn't produce a Saturn that Stanley found convincing.

That was just as well because if they had done so, the movie would have been badly dated by the Voyager missions, which showed Saturn's rings to be far more implausible than anyone had ever imagined.

I have seen enough instances where Nature imitates art, so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed on what Cassini discovers at Iapetus.

I want to thank everyone associated with this mission and the overall project. It may lack the glamour of manned spaceflight, but science projects are tremendously important for our understanding of the Solar System. And who knows, one day our survival on Earth might depend on what we discover out there.

This is Arthur Clarke, wishing you a successful flyby.